Project Description

Sandstone property is an Edinburgh based property management company. They have a number of VIP customers they were providing manual reporting on their housing, occupancy and P&L. This process took a lot of manual effort and involved combining data from different systems using Excel on a monthly basis.

Bridgeall were brought in to provide an automated process to replace the Excel process and provide a reliable data platform with clean enhanced data that supports future reporting requirements.

“We had a labour intensive process for reporting to our clients and internally.

We used bridgeall to create a database from multiple sources which would then generate reports.

Bridgeall understood the brief and completed the database . along with some bespoke reports, to time & budget”

Bill Adams, Group Finance Director, Sandstone Property

Sandstone Property

Sandstone is a leading residential property investment and management company, with over 20 years’ experience in the UK residential property market. With local offices across the country, the group has sourced and renovated over 2,000 properties for clients in over 40 countries and currently manages a portfolio of over £250M.

Sandstone were like most business doing manual reporting. In this scenario they were providing reports to some of their VIP clients about their property portfolio.

This was a manual process pulling information out of their main system SME, exporting these as pdf statements and then converting those into excel to add extra data to it. All of this was carried out monthly with lots of manual effort involved. This took time and opened the process up to human error.

Sandstone realised they wanted to automate this process to not only provide a better experience to their VIP clients but to save them a huge amount of time carrying this process out.

Building a data platform

Bridgeall has a long standing relationship with Sandstone and was asked to provide a solution for their reporting process.

This data was landed in the staging area of a new Azure SQL database where it was validated and cleansed, before being transformed into the target area where it became available for reporting. This nightly process was managed and controlled by Azure Data Factory with alerts generated for any unexpected issues which occurred.

Power BI and excel provide users with the ability to access a single consistent set of data which avoids conflicting figures being used. This data platform provides Sandstone with a wide range of capability and a trusted clean source of data for future reporting requirements as well as facilitating this process it provides the ability to run analysis on this data and the opportunity for future insights.

Then on to the reporting phase. We built a range of occupancy analysis reports for Sandstone. These reports are provided via a core Power BI report that runs off the Azure SQL database using the latest version of the data. Sandstone also had a secondary requirement for Excel reporting. Their clients required it in this format so we built 5 different Excel templates for export that meet their specification. The Excel reports are provided monthly and sent on to their third party customers.

Once the solution was delivered we now provide a full support service to ensure the platform remains operational, update any software changes needed and manage any change requests to the reports or data.

This solution is one that was well received by Sandstone, not only does it save them a significant amount of resource in creating the reports via the automation. The enhanced reporting also provides them with much better insights for their VIP customers.

The ability to automatically combine data from different systems and using Power BI build custom reports to provide a full range of analysis offers huge potential for improved decision making for sandstone and their clients.